In it is a neat contemporary version of Martial's epigram (10.47) on the best way to attain a happy life, a dozen things which we all need at all times.

This is surely the one, the Latin poem (at least) that has most often found an English home - and all because it gives such good answers.

Martial, a Spaniard who came to Rome in the reign of Nero and survived his successors till early in the second century AD, set out a long list of necessities for happiness - from unearned income to fearlessness before death.

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Martial is certainly less sententious than Polonius, and decidedly worth reading after all these centuries. "An unearned income" was undoubtedly a source of English leisure and culture for generations, but middle-class Victorians would have distrusted it, even when they profited from it.

The image of the kite deserves to be matched to Robert Frost's image of a tent, a structure which is held up by being held down, hence is like a woman tied down by loving, while also held standing by loving. In The Silken Tent, the tent, tied to stakes,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Part of Frost's achievement is that the sonnet, in one complex sentence, is in its structure like both the tent and the woman, unified and whole because of submitting to constraints which free it to become itself.

Many thanks for directing me to Martial. Such a list works, I suppose, by pointing out what we feel and know but unconsciously.
But for the 21st century, is the ideal still an unearned income? For most, it would be a vocation much loved and well paid ; but poetry ascribes the needs of poets to all humanity.

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